14 May 2011

With the WHISC staff prematurely on holiday, the duty of publishing this, the last issue of the 2010-11 academic year, has fallen to the WHISC janitor. You may notice a slight dip in production values.

The editors of UMOP 38: Processing Structure would like to announce the final call for papers. This volume would be an ideal place to publish experimental GPs or pilot studies on any aspect of sentence processing. Publishing a project in the working papers series does not preclude publishing it elsewhere.

The deadline for submission is September 15th 2011. The volume will be published in mid October. Please contact the editors for more information or with your intention to submit.

MIT organized a series of colloquia this spring which they describe as focussing "...on large, synthetic questions, crosses multiple schools and departments, and undertakes to be a significant, watershed moment in the intellectual history of its subject." One of these, led by UMass alumna Irene Heim in collaboration with faculty outside of Linguistics, was entitled "Brains, Minds and Machines. This symposium took place from May 3 through May 5 and included talks from UMass alumnus Gennaro Chierchia as well as Barbara Partee. The photo shows Barbara with one of MIT's indigenous linguists.

Displacements have occupied a central role in the development of syntactic theorizing since the outset of Generative Grammar. They are taken as clear exponents of context-sensitive operations that take place in local domains. However, it is well established that some of these operations cannot take place in certain environments which are usually termed 'islands' after Ross (1967) (e.g Complex NP Constraint, Wh-islands, Negative islands, Adjunct islands, Coordinate Structure Constraints). Over the years, there have been a wide range of accounts for the nature and source of the various island effects (for an overview cf. Goodluck & Rochmont 1992, Szabolcsi 2006, Boeckx 2007), with explanations in terms of syntactic locality constraints (e.g. Chomsky 1986, Rizzi 1990, Starke 2001), information structure (e.g. Erteshik-Shir 1973), language processing (e.g. Kluender 1998, Phillips 2006) or semantic well-formedness (e.g. Szabolcsi & Zwarts 1993, Abrusan 2007). Although there is no consensus emerging from these studies, it has become clear that the classical 'bounding node'/'barrier' type of explanation has to be revised and reanalyzed taking into account the latest trends in generative grammar (specially, phase-based computations, multidominance structures, etc.). Thus, some of the questions that we would like to address in this workshop are the following ones:

- What makes islands opaque domains? Do island effects reflect structural ill-formedness, semantic contradiction or language processing difficulties?- Are some domains inherently islands or is islandhood always derivative?- What do islands do? What are the different consequences of derivational and representational approaches to islands? (cf., i.a., Boeckx (2003), Gallego (2010) and Abe & Hornstein (2011) for discussion).- What is the reality and nature of the 'island repair' strategies like the ones proposed in works like Merchant (2001), Fox & Pesetsky (2004), Lasnik (2009)?

We would like this workshop to provide a meeting point and a forum for open discussion for all researchers working on new trends to explain the nature and effects of islands.

At the end of April, I traveled to Greifswald University in Northeastern Germany to give a talk on "Cognitive Wissenschaft und Reformpädagogik" which was a rough translation of a talk that I gave at the Roeper School in Michigan on "Cognitive Science and Progressive Education". I mention it in hopes that others will put a little thought into the wider implications of what we do.

It is with great pleasure that we announce the upcoming Semantics andPhilosophy in Europe 4 conference. The conference will feature experttutorials, symposia, roundtables, and a colloquium on the following topics:

A) The Semantics and Pragmatics of QuotationB) The Semantics of Action SentencesC) The Semantics and Epistemology of Mental State Ascriptions

The purpose of the SPE workshops is to enhance the dialogue betweenlinguists and philosophers and to provide a new forum for presentingresearch in the interface between linguistic semantics and the related areasof philosophy (philosophy of language, logic, philosophy of mind,metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics, epistemology) . SPE takes placeannually in different European cities. The previous meetings took place inParis (SPE1, 2008), London (SPE2, 2009), and Paris (SPE3, 2010).

Submissions of abstracts (650 words including references) are invited for 30min talks or poster presentations on each of the three themes of theconference or related topics. Submissions will be accepted via theconference website until 15 June, 2011.

Tom Roeper gave two talks at the end of April in Mannheim. One, joint work with Luiz Amaral, was on Multiple Grammars and the OPC, and the other, joint work with Terue Mishayita, Suzi Lima and Barbara Pearson, was "The Acquisition of Each, Every, and Plurals and how exhaustivity, genericity, and distributivity are distinguished."

The Ninth International Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation will be held on 26 - 30 September 2011 in Kutaisi, Georgia. The Programme Committee invites submissions for contributions on all aspects of language, logic and computation. Work of an interdisciplinary nature is particularly welcome. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

I direct the Language, Intersensory Perception, and Speech (short: LIPS) lab in the Psychology Department. We are currently looking for undergraduate research assistants to work in the lab in the upcoming Fall and Spring semester.

Research within the LIPS lab looks at how (young and older) listeners recognize speech from hearing and seeing a speaker talk. In particular, we are interested in the time-course of recognizing words, both from listening and from lip-reading, how listeners adjust to a speaker's idiosyncratic pronunciations, and what happens to these processes when people get older.

Typical tasks of our research assistants are:- help with finding, recording, and editing of speech materials for the experiments- assist with recruitment, scheduling, and testing of participants- attend & prepare for weekly lab meetings- do administrative research-related tasks

The typical commitment of our research assistants is 9hrs/week, for 3 credits.

If you are interested in this position, please contact me for more information and/or for an application form.

The prestigious University Fellowships have been announced for the 2011-12 academic year, and the linguistics department's Suzi Lima and Meg Grant are both recipients. The University Fellowships are awarded to graduate students throughout the university based on research accomplishments: there are only 18 given to continuing graduate students. Linguistics was the only department to be awarded more than one fellowship.

Last weekend, I attended MOSS 2 (the second Moscow Syntax and Semantics conference). Also in attendance were the following UMass-related folks: Barbara Partee, Ana Arregui and Malte Zimmerman. Ana presented the second talk of the conference, a joint work with Maria Luisa Rivero and Andres Salanova titled "Imperfectivity: Capturing Variation Across Languages." On the next day, I presented an invited talk titled "The Optionality of Movement and EPP in Dholuo." Malte presented the third invited talk, titled "Contrastive Discourse Particles: Effects of Information Structure and Modality." Overall, it was an incredible program, and also featured fascinating talks by folks from all over Europe, Asia and North America. The program can still be found here:

Kyle Johnson will present ten lectures at the Universidad del País Vasco in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain in the last two weeks of this month. The lectures are on a "Typology of Movement," but, it is rumored, actually show off difficult to draw three dimensional phrase markers.